


Spring Tide

by Tandrelmairon



Category: The Blacklist (TV)
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Protectiveness, Trust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-13 23:37:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9147037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tandrelmairon/pseuds/Tandrelmairon
Summary: In the aftermath of seeing Red take a bullet over the Fulcrum, Liz makes a course correction (episode 2x19). Farther down that new road, my attempt at having them handle a Now or Never situation.  Finally, now up, the aftermath.  Lizzington.  Archive warning is for brief, remembered violence.Spring tide: a tide just after a new or full moon, when there is the greatest difference between high and low water.  (Google)





	1. Chapter 1

             Enigmatic crime lords, it appeared, were better at taking bullets than at taking morphine.

              Liz watched him half-sleep, his good arm restless and his other unnaturally still, the muscles splinting to immobilize the wound. The FBI’s most wanted, with a hole in his chest on a hospital bed at midnight, in the shabby dive apartment of a man he hated, hooked to a morphine pump with a display that said he hadn’t taken a dose in hours.  

              He was still pale from the blood loss, lips pressed together, the lines around his eyes deep in the lamplight. She made herself keep watching. There was a difference, she knew now, between humble everyday guilt and the cold grip in her gut at that moment. It was the difference between the guilt that was part of one’s self-image and the guilt that changed it.

              The morphine controller was wound by its cord around the bedrail. Liz took it and pondered absurdly, as if everything depended on it, whether to press the button for a dose, despite how put out he’d be about it.

              This wasn’t the decision she was there to make. She pushed it once, a quarter of a milligram, good for maybe a quarter hour of better sleep. She watched as his face smoothed, and she gave in and let memory come.  

              Weeks of arguing about the Fulcrum, obsessing over knowing her past as if it could put the unhinged present back in order, with a sick growing feeling that the wrong Liz had been holding the reins. The same Liz who kept a man in chains on a boat. Red’s evasive, determined jollity wearing thinner by the day, not giving an inch on his secrets but telling her more and more plainly that what he was asking for in the Fulcrum was his life.

              And then his enemies concluded he didn’t have it; a daylight ambush in the open street; and there they were.

              At some point in her reverie she realized that, though his body hadn’t moved, his breathing had changed.

              “I know you’re up,” she said, and realized it took focus to keep it from coming out as angry. When had that become the default? More gently, trying for a bit of teasing – “Did the lack of pain wake you?”

              Red opened his eyes and looked back at her wryly. It would have gotten a chuckle, absent the hole in his chest. Or before she’d lashed out in guilty, exhausted anger afterward, at his half-explanation of Tom Keen’s presence in her life.

             “It nearly made me forget what happened altogether.” That was the type of lead-in that would usually have launched him into a mad, questionable story, about a man he’d once known who’d forgotten something ridiculous and possibly fatal; and by the middle of it, he would own the room. Now he didn’t try; he stopped and watched her silently.

              First things first. Liz held up the syringe in her other hand, and let him watch her twist it into the other port on the pump, in the blinking light of the display. “Naloxone, from your private shadow healthcare system. If trouble comes tonight, I will personally push this. You’ll be awake and in plenty of pain to defend yourself in no time.” He blinked, and she held out the morphine controller to him. “So can we use the morphine?”

              Red raised his good hand in surrender, and took it from her outstretched hand. “But I warn you, Agent Keen, morphine makes me lie uncontrollably. You wouldn’t believe some of the nonsense I could wind up saying. _But it is important to be willing to be made a fool_.”

              She laughed a bit. Reddington, back on the job, being charming and dropping quotes. Offering a sally to start up one of their usual skirmishes. Or, it occurred to her oddly, perhaps more another invitation to dance.

              Either way, just now, after everything, it would be easy to forget his lethality and his murky plans behind plans, and the guilt eviscerating her now would make it even easier. An even different Liz, one she could just stretch herself to imagine, could have decided to start leaning on his always-offered arm, overlooked the things he’d done without facing the rough work of forgiving them, and grown to align herself fully with him. Whatever new illicit empires he would have used that latitude to build, he would not have used it to hurt her. It would be easy. It would mean some rest.

              But she wasn’t that Liz either, and there was so much she needed to do instead. Start feeling out a way to live after Tom. Find some kind of peace with the years they’d had together. Find her way back to becoming the agent she’d planned to be. Knowing herself, seeing herself the past months, her more likely path to all that was putting up walls and mines between herself and the man in front of her, treating every incursion as an act of war.

             She needed a middle path. A way to hold Red back without bristling at everything he said, without getting so fixated on pushing back that she couldn’t hear when he was desperate.

            She needed five more years of field experience. She needed sleep.

            Liz took a breath, and dropped the bedrail nearest the door. “Can you make some space?”

            It took him a beat to look over her worn sweat suit and realize she was serious. But he rewarded her with a look of shock that would have done credit even to a man who _didn’t_ wear dissipation like a piece of his tailored suits. On him, it was priceless, and she laughed aloud for what felt like the first time in months.

            “Come on. Drop the horrified ‘indecent proposition’ look. Where else can I sleep and have a clean shot to the doorway?”

             She was trying for teasing without sting - it was a peace offering - but it came out more tentatively than she’d intended. This was too jarring a shift from jabbing at him a few hours ago. He didn’t understand; he would still be waiting for another blow. One could do any amount of repentant soul-searching, but there was still a hard talk to have at the end of it.

             So she added, more softly, aware she was stalling for time, “I’m not here to hurt you.”

             He opened his mouth to say something Reddingtonian. Possibly, how absurd this was with Dembe and a private army just outside. Or, for all she knew, how much better the hospital beds were in the Seychelles. Then he shut it again, no doubt grimly calculating that after today, her fleabag motel room was no safer tonight than here.

             He watched her for a long moment, his blue-green eyes at once unreadable and disconcertingly mild in the lamplight. That face could be stunningly expressive or close like a trap; he seemed for a moment to be choosing between them. Finally he said, “Head to foot. Let’s minimize our chances of friendly fire, shall we?”

             She raised her eyebrows and glanced at his piece on the table. “You think you can still shoot?”

             Red made one of his spare, efficient facial gestures as he worked himself over toward the far side of the bed. “Right-handed. Expect me to waste two shots per cartridge.”

             “Just two, in the dark?   That’s confidence.” He did chuckle a little at that, and then winced, visibly regretting it.

             It didn’t matter. It was the last volley Liz had in her, anyway. She swung her legs up and lay her head back alongside his legs, pulled the thin hospital cover over her, and tried to summon up who she’d been until the last year of her life. It would be easy to let them both fall asleep – _well_ , she corrected herself, squirming up against the bedrail to keep from crowding him, _not easy, exactly_ \- and he would be cheerfully evasive in the morning and bring her another case next week, and never say another word about what led them to today.

             And she could still feel the familiar call of the obsession with finding her own story, that inviting whisper that maybe another few well-placed retorts tomorrow would make him relent and tell all.   It was still unreasonable as hell of him to withhold it. She had just never realized how far off the cliff of unreasonable she would jump herself in pursuit.

             But Sam had raised her on the story of a man who could climb any fence. He tossed his hat over it first, because then he had to get over the fence to get his hat.

             “Red,” she said, staring at stains best left unidentified on the pitted ceiling, “I’m sorry.”

             Whether it was the morphine or not, his voice was softened when he spoke. She’d seen that fluid tenor both seduce and terrify, sometimes simultaneously.   Just this once, she decided that whether he was using it to conscious effect now was his own business. “Lizzy. Why?”

             She could still remember when his use of that nickname had seemed sinister. It was oddly cheering now. It was time. She took a breath.

             “I gave you a reason for withholding the Fulcrum. Fear that you’d misuse it. A good, honorable reason. And then I tried to bargain it to you for my own secrets, and so clearly _that_ was my reason after all.”

             The sick weight of that hit her again, and she gave up on being calm and reflective about it, and popped back up to sitting. His eyes were open, watching her, with the stillness of a man who felt the earth turning under him. Watching him made it harder; she looked down at the bedclothes instead to focus, to get it out.

             “I didn’t believe you that that thing was your life. I wasn’t willing to. I think a part of me believes you’re immortal.”

             “Strictly speaking, Agent Keen,” he replied cheerfully after a moment, “we haven’t proven I’m not.” She looked up - the tone was so at odds with his look a moment ago – and there was an incongruous depth of pity in his eyes. He was giving her an out to move on.

             That was what decided her. Liz took hold of the bedrail to remind herself to stay in place and meet his eyes. “The person who did that is gone,” she said simply. “I mean, she still sickens me.” That desperate scrabbling after the past, as if the present were worth nothing without it. “But she’s gone.”

             He cocked his head, his close-shorn hair catching the light, weaving slightly in that curious way he had. It had seemed snakelike to her once. At some point, she had realized he did it when he was almost literally trying to study a problem from every angle at once.

             She took another breath. “And I’ll show you, with time, if you let me, that you won’t need to fear her again.” That was murky, not exactly what she’d meant to say – he should have plenty to fear from Agent Keen. Just not from the version who’d held the reins the past few months.

             And she couldn’t quite leave it there anyway. “Even if you are being paternalistic and unreasonable as hell. Dangerous to know the truth. Ridiculous.” She sighed. “But I believe you believe it.”

             At least it had begun as a good apology before going off the rails. But Red was staring at her, either affected or perhaps taking on another hit of the good stuff. He blinked quickly a few times. After a long moment he spoke, almost tentatively, like he was reaching for his normal blithe charm but catching it somehow sideways. “Trusting a proxy to…befriend you was, as you so earthily put it, unreasonable as hell. If and when you’ll let me, I’ll show you, etcetera, that I know that. But a bit of fear is usually healthy, Agent Keen.”

             She laughed, not sure where he was going with that. There was no total absolution here; he still had a hole in him thanks to her temporary madness, and she had the wreckage of a life around her thanks to his arrogant best intentions. But something that had gone wrong was starting to come right again.

             Red dropped his head back on the pillow. After a moment he reached his good arm over to flip off the lamp, and she sat looking down at him in the trickle of streetlamp light through the window. A muscle in his face was working, the way it did before each of his rare moments of piercing honesty. “That feeling, not recognizing yourself. Words don’t capture it, do they? You’re fortunate, and I’m glad, if this is the first time you’ve felt it.” His lips quirked. “Or the last.”

             Liz laughed once, wryly. He shifted, trying out a new position, scrupulously avoiding letting their bodies touch, though their heats were starting to mingle. It was going to be a long night.

             After a moment he spoke again. “I’ve spent thirty-four years driven mostly by anger.”

             And the constant present absence of a wife and child.

             “If I could tell you how to prevent that,” he went on, “I would. I can only tell you that the regrets last even longer.”

             She lay back, and her own voice sounded louder in the darkness. “How do _you_ control it?”

              Another wry chuckle. He must be feeling better. “Jokes that make people uncomfortable. Stories, sometimes.” He sighed. “Occasionally, a brief stay in a bulletproof containment box.”

              Liz took that in, and felt the world turn a bit herself.

              Of all his reasons for coming, in all his many-layered plans, she was suddenly sure that that was one. He had wanted to sometimes be stopped.

              She pulled that thread – it was time to get her profiling skills back into gear - and felt something come together, some dim outline of that middle way she needed. Their normal give-and-take of trust and disbelief, push and pushback – there was nothing really wrong with it, at its core. Just no need to always be planning attacks and tensing for blows; his never really landed. All this time, Reddington wasn’t sparring with her at all. He was dancing. He needed someone to push back, sometimes, to stay on his feet.

              None of which made his insufferable, Red-knows-best fixation on keeping her ignorant about her own story any less absurd.   No one was ever made safer by knowing less. That was some Superman, Lois Lane secret-identity comic book bullshit. But he believed it.

_“_ Still going to fight you, Reddington,” she murmured. _But maybe not to hurt you_. “Ulterior motives and comic-book bullshit. Definitely be afraid.” Maybe, it occurred to her absurdly, she should learn one or two quotes to throw back at him when he became insufferably literary.

              “Go to sleep, Agent Keen.” In that silky voice there was an undertone of relief. “You can interrogate me further in the morning.” He shifted his feet to give her room. “I just hope you’re not a kicker.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading. Critiques are much appreciated, especially on characterization and psychology, pacing, use of tense, and holding interest.

              Lizzy lifted her head. Half-asleep, his ribs felt its absence, and he swam up toward consciousness. “Red,” she said softly, lifting one hand to his shoulder. “The tide’s turned.”

              Yes. The sound of the water lapping was back. The air had changed over, and his headache was gone. He opened his eyes, swallowed, and looked down at her.  

              She was just shaking off sleep too, a few minutes ahead of him. Young lungs. Quick to recover. But not, and to hell with the Naval Academy for instilling useless gems like this, big enough to escape.

              His back against the wall, legs stretched out, he filled his own lungs a few times and leaned over her dark head to check his watch. Five in the evening. Two hours since low tide.

              “It’s taking us longer to wake now,” she said evenly, reading his mind.

              “Yes.” The unnatural flush in her face as she looked up over her shoulder at him, and the slight remaining constriction of the pupils, wrecked him again. Exactly as it had each of the last three times they woke.   He closed his eyes for a moment, then smiled down at her. “Are you thirsty?”

              “No. You?”

              “A bit.” He shifted slightly, to get at the water bottle without dislodging her. He unscrewed the cap one-handed and took thirty milliliters or so. At a liter and a half for each of them daily, the water had lasted last about as long as the air would. Perhaps another day.

              With that swallow, he was up to a bit of storytelling.

              “I once knew a man with an insatiable thirst for crème liqueurs,” he started, and was rewarded by _feeling_ her eyes roll as she dropped her head back against him. But she didn’t stop him. “Also a reasonably good cat burglar. But first and foremost, a connoisseur.”

              “Did he get drunk and botch a job?” She shifted against him, trying to find a new place for her head; he slipped the offending vest button loose.

              “Essentially, yes, but the story is in how. He did the job – Lunda artifacts in the DR Congo, if I recall - but missed his getaway, holed up overnight, and apparently felt safe enough to get drunk and spill some on his luggage. He risked a commercial flight the next day, and the artifacts sailed through security. But he’d forgotten the bottle in his bag.”

              She sucked in a breath, catching on. Quantico proved itself not entirely worthless once again. “And when they swabbed the bag for secondary screening –“

              “Yes. The glycerin in the spill set off the explosive alarm.” He shook his head. “One thing led to another, and then, Congolese prison for grand theft.”

              She laughed, and so did he. He wondered if it improved air exchange – a gap in his long-forgotten training.

              The trouble with a prison that was airtight in high tide, however comfortable otherwise, wasn’t the oxygen. Far quicker, it was the carbon dioxide.

              Four tides ago, when they were more optimistic and certainly far cleaner, he’d calculated whether one person alone could survive the highest coming waters. Staring down through the air exchange grill in the floor at the dark waters below their cell, once a natural erosion in the ochre stone, he’d concluded it would take her six or eight hours longer to enter the last coma without him using the air. The Academy was getting its long-awaited vengeance after all. But Lizzy had given him a prescient, piercing look, and he’d put a stop to the idea of useless dramatics.

              They had shouted at each other the day before that, in their first moments in the cell - stupidly, without real anger, and almost by unspoken agreement, knowing those would be the last normal moments of their lives. He had upbraided her for her stubbornness in finding her own path here against his will, and she him for his compulsive secrecy, still, after so long. It didn’t matter. A missile control room with a two-man launch-cancel system had already made it clear they both were needed.

              Afterward, he had offered up his empire for her release - contacts, funds, assets and secrets – and been rebuffed. A perfect example, if one were needed, of why he’d always hated purist ideological cults. He and Lizzy had saved half the eastern seaboard, and they were going to die, and he had failed.

              “And, remarkably, I’m still not sorry,” she had whipped at him, toward the end of that quarrel. When she heard herself say it, the both of them reduced to grade-school retorts, she had nearly run out of steam. She had just enough left to repeat it, softly, more gently. “You won’t hear it this time, Red, if that’s what you’re looking for. I’m not. Let it go.”

              Whatever anger he’d held onto had drained away then. She was right, in a way. No prizes for the winner here. He’d thought that he had met despair before, and he had been wrong.

              “I am.” And then he’d said what he’d worked for years never to have to say to anyone, and bled out his empire ensuring he’d never have to say to her. “Lizzy, I don’t have a plan.”

              She’d closed her eyes for a moment. “I know.” Then: “Tell me about this cell.”

              He’d thought for a sick moment she was gathering intelligence, trying to develop the plan he hadn’t, and that he was going to have to tell her more plainly, _the key fact about this cell is that we’re going to die here._ Then he realized she was only trying to give him something to do next.

              “It’s a waiting chamber, a softening-up room of sorts, for enemies slated for interrogation.” He gestured to the bed and the water jugs. “The principle isn’t suffering.” Yet. “In keeping with their concept of the afterlife, it’s dread.” They hadn’t even taken the pocket knife she’d carried ever since losing her service weapon. Keep your tokens of safety, the process said. It will not matter. There was a long history of breaking prisoners here, not _without_ laying a hand on, so much as _before_.

              Red had slipped off his suit jacket in the heat, folding it neatly on the twin bed’s slate-grey duvet. The time would come soon when he’d lose any interest in neatness or order, but not quite yet. “We have a semidiurnal tide here, probably placing us somewhere off the East Coast.” That was when the Academy had first started to creep back from its thirty-six years of exile.

              Lizzy had given him the same patient look he sometimes got from her halfway through a long lead-in to a new case, the one that made him want to draw it out as long as possible just to watch her struggle not to shake him. “Every twelve hours, the tide will peak beneath us. On its way up, when it reaches the level of the air pipe below, the room will become a sealed chamber, silent, like now. The carbon dioxide level will rise. We’ll experience flushing, headache, eventually loss of consciousness. Then as the tide goes out, the water will drop below the pipe’s level, the air will freshen, and we’ll wake and hear the lapping.” He paused, fractionally, but there was no purpose served by keeping the rest back. “We’re approaching spring tide with the new moon. The waters will…be higher. Near the limits of survivability.”

              “And then they’ll question us.”                                                            

              When they came, they’d bring their instruments. But he doubted, at this point, that they had any questions left. They had made their plans clear enough, and written them on the bodies of enough faithful associates. He had done things himself that would never leave him, to acquire information, but it was what they had done to men with no information at all that had made him understand how this would end.

              He picked his way through the words in his mind. Finally he sat on the bed and held up a corner of the rough duvet between his fingers.

              “Lizzy, this is synthetic. We can burn it at any time when the chamber is sealed. You never have to even see them.” 

              He saw the light of his meaning rise in her eyes. He'd once seen a synthetic tarpaulin caught up in a shipboard fire.  The fumes had peeled the waterproofing off the wooden deck, and here in a sealed cell, they would asphyxiate them within ten minutes of ignition.

              The ghosts of the profiles and catches she could have made down all the coming years were so real, for that moment, that he had to catch his breath.   She dropped on the bed beside him and said nothing for a long moment.  

              “Well,” she’d said finally, “trust you to know your fabrics. I’ll search, too, before we break out the violins.”

              And she had, inch by inch, less hoping he’d missed something than checking off that box. Quantico was good at boxes.

              Red had lain back, saving his breath, and used the time to calculate how long this and future intervals awake should last. With her current activity level, he gave them about an hour of useful consciousness remaining now. Next time, subtracting recovery, perhaps eight. Meanwhile, Lizzy found the biscuits provided for them.

              When the mattress dipped beneath him, he opened his eyes. She was beside him, drawing her knees to her chest, and dropped her forehead onto them, hiding her face. He’d seen many times before, but it never failed to strike him, how even terror sometimes took a back seat to embarrassment. He closed his eyes, the only kind of privacy they could offer each other from now on, and promised himself he’d only make her hear this once.

              “Lizzy. I’m so sorry.”

              She didn’t answer right away; she never liked to speak when her voice was unsteady. It made her silent at odd times sometimes.   But after a moment she shifted over against him, shoulder to shoulder. “You know, you say that at all the wrong times.” She rubbed her temples. “Does your head hurt, too?”

              He nodded. “But we’ll be asleep soon. Let it come, Lizzy. You’ll wake again.”

              He could have laughed at himself for letting that habit – making offers of safety, however small - run on long past its usefulness. It was really himself he was comforting. But she’d dropped her head on his shoulder, and they spun down into the dark.

 

 

              When they’d woken, the disorientation had lasted longer than he’d expected. It wasn’t only the air; it was also the unchanging light and the cell itself. Yellow lamplight above; patternless, almost organically curving sandstone all around; dark water lapping below. It could have been midnight, or noon. It was about five in the evening.  Another day and a half till spring tide.

              His syndicate’s protocols for his death would activate in four hours. The ones for hers would wait another forty-eight.

              They’d paced the walls to shake out their legs, and eaten just enough to steady themselves. The more of the biscuits they ate, the more water they’d require.

              It didn’t matter, they agreed ruefully.  “Carbon dioxide poisoning does wonders to curb the appetite,” he started, shaking the crumbs down through the grate below. And then he did laugh at himself.

              She raised her eyebrows. “What is it?”

              He shook his head. “The habit of lecturing you. I don’t know when it started. I didn’t use to, as a rule. You must have wanted to put any number of additional pens through my neck over the years.”

              Cross-legged on the floor, Lizzy had laughed. “I stopped using them and switched to a voice recorder. Same reason the Bureau took my piece - it wasn’t worth the risk. Someone had told me the only thing worse than the anger was the regret.”

              Her pupils were normalizing again. She stood, shook the crumbs off, and leaned back against the wall.   “But look, while we’re still ourselves, I need to say this.”

              It was strange; they’d said any number of hurtful things over the years, despite all their best intentions, and that came with the path he’d chosen into her life. But they had come so far that the surge of apprehension he felt just then wasn’t fair. Possibly the anxiety of the receding narcosis.

              “You didn’t fail. I didn’t either. We’re the stuff of legend. Six million innocent people safe.” She bowed her head for a moment. “We’re just depressed we’re not two of them.” She looked back up at him with something very much like pity. “But even you can’t call it a bad trade.”

              He’d swallowed. He was grateful, oddly enough, that he hadn’t been given the choice. The universe and her stubbornness had spared him that, and it was no small thing. “No. Just not the one I’d planned to make.”  

              Lizzy nodded. “‘ _Planning is essential, but plans don’t work out_ ,’” she misquoted, and somewhere Eisenhower turned over in his grave.

              It was too much. She was too calm; any number of times, he’d watched her just win the battle for control over far smaller things. Control was a tool, and as useless here within these smooth walls as any other tool besides a crane and wrecking ball. He wondered if she’d caught it from him, the pathologic need to keep up a game face.

              “Lizzy,” he’d said carefully, expecting to regret it, “you don’t have to be brave if you don’t want to. You don’t have to be embarrassed with me. I’m sure there’s a pen here somewhere if you want to have another go.”

              She looked back at him steadily. “I’m staying in denial for now. I haven’t made it to anger yet. You should join me. It’s better here.”

              She paced the room again, halfheartedly, and dropped back on the bed beside him. “Besides, I could say the same thing to you. Could have said, any time the last four years.”

              “Did say, a time or two, as I recall,” he agreed. But it was different for him. He’d been expecting a sticky end like this for years; he’d been cured of that instinctive human conviction about harm, _it will never happen to me_ , thirty-six years before on a snowy Christmas Eve. But he wasn’t sure how to say that without sounding self-pitying, so he said nothing.

              It didn’t matter. She wasn’t a profiler for nothing.   “Red,” she’d said softly, ‘’you can’t steam in guilt for the next three days. It’s unreasonable as hell.” She turned and sat cross-legged, facing him, and took his hand to take the sting out of her next words. “Don’t you know that always taking on responsibility for things you can’t control is exactly what makes you so damn scary?”

              Having taken a literal bullet to the heart before, he knew this feeling was different; he imagined her words more as an arrow, thin as a thread of light, piercing without harming, illuminating something long in darkness.   He laid a hand on her hair for a moment and could find nothing to say for a while.

              There was no reason any more not to explain how a reputation for being ruthless and slightly unhinged also helped to keep down the need for manifest violence. But it seemed beside the point.

              Finally he said, “Cooper will get the rest of the Blacklist in a few hours. A bit of an early – let’s see – Earth Day present.”

              Lizzy nodded, in a kind of satisfaction. “Generous. Job security for life.”

              They’d traded stories for a while afterward, half of which they’d each heard before. They’d paced the room and stretched.

              It was when the lapping water stopped again, in the sticky silence that followed, that she’d moved on from denial. She wept quietly against him, and then not quietly, on and off, till they both lost consciousness again.

 

              He’d woken from a stew of memory and dream. Lizzy, exasperated, in her living room – “You have to stop breaking in. I admit your timing has been excellent, and I was wrong about the Wyvern here finding me, which is why I’m giving you this key. But _I need you to pretend to be a normal person long enough to knock_.” Dembe at fourteen, watching from a doorway, still eyeing him with unboyish suspicions after two months in his care; he heard his own voice saying, “I’m many things, Dembe, but _I am not that sort of man_.” Tom Keen, bloodied and broken against a wall, but this time Red didn’t take a chance on whether Lizzy could finish it; he did it there in front of her. The scores of people he’d killed ringed round him silently, still pleading, each a different picture of fear; they did not realize they were dead already.

              Lizzy was shaking him. He was talking in his sleep. He came to, enough to stop, and opened his eyes. She was scanning his face, inches away, watching his pupils. His throat was dry.

              He was well aware he talked in his sleep occasionally. A peculiar cross to bear for an information dealer, and another reason he’d long preferred to sleep alone, and to own the room he slept in. In their months as fugitives, without morphine to keep him quiet, it had been an unending challenge to ensure separate rooms all the way, cementing her image of him as absurdly prudish where she was concerned. It wasn’t even, any more, about what he was afraid she’d hear; she knew the bare facts of enough of his crimes to get the picture. It was the tones she’d hear it in.

              And now she had.

              No doubt it was only fair his secrets be stripped away in these remaining days. It was only that he hadn’t expected not to know which secrets, precisely, he’d been stripped of.

              He’d groaned. “Are you going to tell me what I was saying?”

              Lizzy sat back, the muscles round her eyes relaxing, in obvious relief that he was coherent. “You sang like a canary, Reddington. I wish I’d thought of doing this to you sooner.” There was something underlying the lightness in her tone, but whatever it was, it wasn’t the revulsion he’d expected.

              But she didn’t, apparently, plan to elaborate. As his head cleared, he couldn’t remember ever feeling naked in quite that way before. The austere, lofty, ruthless justifications for the secrets he had kept for her were gone now.   The men he’d killed to keep them might as well have lived, and he could hear them pleading still.

              “Lizzy,” he’d said quietly, after a moment. “Is there anything you want to ask me? I’ll tell you, if you still want to know.”

              She laughed once, a wild, almost unhinged sound. “I may not have really believed we were done for, till I heard you say that.”

              Red had braced himself and waited, while she took a sparing drink and sat in silence. Then, for the second time that day, she undid him.

              “Do you still think it’s better if I don’t?”

              The fog in his mind was still receding; he looked at her, gut-punched.   In his years of redirecting and deflecting her, losing ground inch by inch as she pried and slipped round him into her past, the one constant had been her rock-bottom certainty he was wrong to block her. Arrogant and inflexible. To hear that question from her…once in Delhi, a city dog, at once heavily pregnant and obscenely skeletal, had wandered out of the mist into his doorway like a canine madonna. He’d set out a bowl of milk; after gulping it down, she’d lain on her side, and then laid her head on his knee and closed her eyes for a moment, before padding off into the night. She knew that in the morning she’d be hungry again and he’d be gone, and he doubted anyone in her memory had ever kept up humanity’s side of domestication’s ancient bargain. Her trust was neither a habit nor a request. Just a gift.

              “I think it would spin you around,” he said finally. “And for nothing. Perhaps, by the way I kept your secrets, I made them seem more…more, than they should have been. They were never what made you.” Her parents, he hoped strangely, might have managed just enough love for her to agree.

              Lizzy shook her head, and when he turned at the motion, he saw tears in her eyes. “Then let it go, Reddington,” she said softly. “I can always interrogate you further in the morning.”

              “What on earth,” he’d asked her in wonderment, “did I say in my sleep? Why couldn’t I have said it years ago while awake?”

              She laughed a bit, and then sobered. “Not what. How.”

              He looked at her questioningly, but she didn’t elaborate. He supposed a taste of his own medicine was in order.

              They’d cut the bedsheets into strips with her pocket knife and dipped them into the grate below, where the waters lay a few feet beneath them now. They took turns using them for seawater sponge baths, each facing the wall in turn for privacy’s sake, though after three months on the lam together she’d long ago seen all the scars that mattered.

              Of course, they then had to re-dress in the decent minimum of the same grimy clothes, but it was still immeasurably better; bodies were like children, indifferent to context, wanting what they wanted. He told her about his months imprisoned in a former Gulag site repurposed by the Russian mob, and the things some men longed for more than anything else – women and alcohol, but also a parrot, a Sunday paper and a weekly poker game. For him, it had always been a bath.

              “I’ve been thinking about regret,” she said afterward.

              He’d wanted to stop her there, tell her not to waste time on it, but there were limits to his capacity for hypocrisy.   He had let men live for hours longer than he’d planned to make their peace with their regrets sometimes; he’d offered an ear for those who wanted one.   The idea of being that ear for Lizzy now made him feel unmoored, as if the floor had dropped away and there were only the dark waters beneath them. Aloud, he said, “Tell me.”

              She twisted, away from him this time, showing him her back; he could see the muscles moving over the thin vertebrae as she bowed her head. “We’ve hurt each other a few solid times. Do you remember that, that sick certainty, knowing that from _this_ one, this time, there was no coming back?”

              Her face as she’d handed him the Fulcrum. When she’d first learned how Tom died, before she understood why. Her awakening memories of his presence in the fire. Sam. Always the wrong piece of knowledge at the wrong time, going off like a small landmine, and him always hamstrung from fixing it for fear of stepping on the next one.   All the things he had done because he saw the need and no one else to do it, and she was always wrong about why, and she was still always right that they were vile.

              There had been far less hurt, he was dimly aware, than they might have had – he could feel the shadows of the ghost history they could have made, if he’d stayed as overbearing and secretive, and she as impulsive and single-minded, as they’d begun. Which other pleading specters, strange or familiar, would be ringed round him here tonight, had they not learned a little from each other?

              He’d laid one hand on her scalp, his thumb on her warm living ear, flushed with the hypercapnia. “I remember.”

              “Regret’s a bitch,” she concluded, decisively, and they both laughed. “But we were wrong, weren’t we? You can be wrong about that. I’m glad we had the time to find that out.”

              “Time. Lizzy.” He shook his head. “I had intended you to have so much time. These few years were meant to be the squall. To scour out the skies and waters, and leave you a calm sea for the decades to come. I would have done things differently, if I’d known.”  

              She scooted herself round to face him. “Four more years alive, and a better death. That’s not nothing. We both got a better death out of it.” Her lips quirked slightly. “You made some epic adenda to your case file. And I got a truly incredible music box.”

              Her courage was ebbing and falling like the tide, running high now, soon to drop, and every time it changed he loved her differently.

              “It wasn’t you talking at all, in your sleep,” she’d added, apropos of nothing. “You were others. Begging yourself for mercy.”

              His body was clean, but it was amazing, how quickly one could feel filthy again.

              “Talking to that other Red, the way I used to watch that other Liz.” She swallowed; obedient, under her gaze, he didn’t look away. “What I’m trying to say is, we’ve both been wrong before, about what was unforgivable.”

              The tunnel might have opened and unfolded like a book beneath them, the air changed over entirely, the way those words filled him.

              He’d decided to chalk it up to the hypercapnia, one day from spring tide.

              Somewhere outside, the next parts of his death protocol were activating. The pieces of his empire were shedding off, dissolving, transforming. Paying his debts, providing for his people, finishing his wars. It didn’t do to have only one set of plans. Here inside, he was still reeling, light with equal parts grief and gratitude, when he pulled her over between his outstretched legs, her back against his chest, and they leaned back to let the darkness take them again.

             

              And now, after waking again to the quiet lap of the water below, and drowning it out for a few minutes with an airport security story, here they were. Lizzy, who clearly would have flourished in a Congolese prison, had wrapped a strip of bedsheet round her finger and made a toothbrush of it. He followed suit, reflecting in passing that of the many devices he’d improvised in captivity, none had been intended for hygiene.

              They relieved themselves over the grate in turns. Lizzy proved have a shy bladder, which annoyed her to no end, and it took his quoting passages about water mercilessly, lying on his side facing the wall, before she could pull it off.

              “For the love of God, Red, do you have them catalogued by subject?” she asked, finally finishing. He heard the sound of her zipping and replacing the knife in her pocket.  

              “ _Water is fluid, soft, and yielding_ ,” he went on, to annoy her further. He didn’t remember the rest until he’d gotten that far, and then regretted it. “ _But water will wear away rock, which is rigid and cannot yield_.” That was a bit on the nose, but no harm in finishing. “ _This is another paradox: what is soft is strong_.”

              “Aristotle,” she said decisively, utterly wrong, to annoy him in turn.

              He decided to bear it patiently. “Lao Tzu.”

              And then to his astonishment, behind him, she answered, “In that case, _being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage._ ”

              He turned, eyebrows raised, impressed. “Lizzy.”

              Later, he would think that it was actually that moment, when he saw the look in her eyes, that the points of the compass began to wheel round him like stars, old pieces spinning into new places. Not the moment later, when for the second time in memory, she stood over the edge of the bed and said to him, “Can you make some space?”

              And certainly not when he sat up and she sat down beside him, shoulder to shoulder, turned her head and gathered her courage, and asked him, “Red, would you like to come to bed with me?”

              It was sweet, clear-eyed, and the least seductive proposition he’d ever received.

              It wasn’t seduction she was going for.

              Abstractedly, he made note that the physical signs of hypercapnia on her were no worse than before. His mind was running possibilities unbidden.   Using sexuality to interdict mortal fear was ancient, effective, and under the circumstances, entirely reasonable. If that was what she wanted, perhaps he should have suggested it himself sooner, and spared her having to overcome FBI ethics training and social gender conditioning to come out with it herself.

              He was blindsided by an image of it - soothing her with his hands, drawing her out and exhausting them both, consciously overwhelming themselves, so that when the dark closed over again they’d be inured to it. In his body, biology stirred and half-raised its head; bodies cared little for context. Was that what she wanted?

              Or was it just the freedom of helplessness, the persistence of that small long-burning itch with no reason any more not to scratch it? He had seen the small occasional evidences of her attraction, but they were involuntary, unwanted because of what he was and so much the better. And so he had sympathized and filed them away to be ignored. The thought of giving himself license to play on them, and her to own them, was forbidden and unbalancing.

              Except that now it wasn’t. Like a last cigarette, it was transformed by circumstance into something harmless, even innocent.

              Or was this some continuation of what she’d said before about guilt? Using his body to silence for a few moments his memory’s recital of his crimes and regrets? As a solution, it was both everything and nothing, acceptance without absolution. But he couldn’t help it, he was so touched at the _idea_ , like refrigerator art from a loving hand, something softened absurdly in him at just the possibility.

              Whatever her thinking, Lizzy wasn’t wired for no-strings encounters, or she could have found relief in them any number of times in the past years. If there was some place on Earth, at some time before death, that she could want this with him, what it suggested she saw in him was too wrenchingly sweet to risk thinking of.

              “Lizzy,” he said finally, “I’m adrift here. Make me understand.”

              She was still for a moment, the way she always was when unsure of herself, trying to give nothing away but broadcasting everything, in rough-edged, heart-twisting loveliness. “We’re going to be in unfriendly hands soon. I had this thought - it might be better, it might be something good, to…put myself in your hands first, and let you put yourself, if you want to, in mine.”

              He cocked his head. “Have you considered,” he asked finally, “what you would do if, against all reason, my associates arrived before tomorrow?”

              Her lip quirked. “’Or the task force,’ I’m sure you meant to add.”

              “Lizzy,” he answered with visible patience, “I’m trying to keep us within the realm of possibility.”

              As he’d hoped, she laughed, and relaxed a bit. Careful of the new charge of meaning in touching her, he folded his hands. “You could come to regret it. To blame one or both of us. And whether you blamed me or not, you’d want…distance. I’m not certain I’d be in a position to afford you that any more than before. The evidence hardly suggests your world is getting safer.”

              He heard how absurd that was as he said it, a psychological projection off a hypothetical situation too improbable to count. Judging from the look in her eyes, she was thinking the same thing. He decided to fillet himself open a little more.

              “You don’t think, do you…if I ever made you believe I came with this intention...” _I am so many, many things, but I am not that sort of man._ Not fool enough to think fantasies could be kept penned in their place, he had not imagined being with her; he had at times put considerable energy into _not_ imagining it. Not, however she might profile him, out of a compulsion toward self-punishment, but in too much kinship with Chesterton’s diabolist – ‘ _I tell you I have done everything else. If I do that I shan’t know the difference between right and wrong_.’

              “I know,” she said solemnly. “I do. And you’re right, this could absolutely go back in time and change the purity of your intentions in retrospect. Because that is how time works.”

              He blinked.

              “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said softly, perched there beside him, for the second time in memory. “Whatever you decide. There’s no wrong answer.” And then, with a curious directness, “But I wanted you to know either way - if you can possibly help gloating about it - that for a while now, the most beautiful sound I’ve heard is your voice, saying my name.”

              Those words pulled him in over his head, grief and love and regret and the shining impossible gratitude that he had ever been given the grace to know her.

              She was right, of course. The ends of things brought a moment of weightless, impossible freedom, and there was nothing more reasonable here at this end than seeking out friendly hands. The many-raftered edifice of plans he’d built round her was coming down in wreckage, and there was nothing left but love.

             “Lizzy,” he said softly. “I know this may be difficult for you, but you’re not going to need that pocket knife.”

              She laughed, and held it out to him. Almost a solemn moment, but he wanted something other than solemnity. He set it on the floor and took her face in his hands. “Nervous?”

              Lizzy gave a small, half-embarrassed shrug. “Used up all my calm getting us this far. You?”

              “Absurdly so,” he agreed, laughing, and released her and stretched out lengthwise. She leaned over, watching him.   “I once knew a man,” he started, “who –“ and as he’d hoped, she laughed and covered his mouth with her hand, and then lay herself down beside him.

              It was more like freefall than anything else he could think of, to be suddenly free to touch her differently. To stroke an unbroken line down her back, to hold her head lightly as she explored his neck, carefully at first, then with his encouragement, more boldly. To take her shoulders, lead her onto her back, and run his fingers over her abdomen and ribs, noting the muscles tense where he crossed a ticklish line, and relax again when he switched to his flattened palm.

              He let her accustom herself to his touch, stroking areas that were intimate but not completely vulnerable, and gain confidence in touching him. Her fingers explored the back of his head, lightly, then travelled down to tug his shirt untucked; he rolled on his back, folded his hands behind his head and watched her work on the buttons with the focus of a woman disarming a bomb.

              When she looked up, something in his eyes must have tipped her over, or at least that was the moment he became certain. Her flush had changed, her pupils widened. Nervous or not, she was affected; she saw him noticing and paused to let him watch, and oh, there it was, the answering tug of passion pooling in his own gut.

              “Lizzy,” he heard himself say, absurdly reverent, certain she would laugh at him, hoping she would.

              “Still beautiful,” she answered. “I used to have to work at it, not to be hypnotized by that voice.” She faltered for a moment. “I would have liked to hear it longer.”

              He pulled her down beside him and passed one hand over her eyes. “Then just listen now.” He smiled. “When I become insufferable, you’ll interrupt me anyway.”

              He whispered to her as they peeled each other’s clothing off, article by article, taking unspoken turns as if it were any other game. A shade too pink, but so extremely alive, she was spare and endearingly soft at the same time, and he hoped wryly that she would think something similar of him; they were both of them active, but no dedicated athletes. He murmured encouragement till her hands hesitated at her last bits of clothing, and then caught them in his own for a moment. “When you’re ready. If you want. You don’t have to be embarrassed with me.”

              She rose up on her knees and leaned her forehead against his. “Not embarrassed.” She flashed a grin. “Just processing. Not all of us plan twenty moves ahead.”   He laughed, mouth open, and that was when she leaned in to kiss him.

              It caught him off guard; he hadn’t been sure if that was part of this, and he was still for a moment, unsure of what she wanted from it. But her confidence seemed to grow as his faltered, as he let her lips touch him like a burst of sunlight, and by the time she pulled free, something had changed, or clarified.

              She laid her hands on his chest and back, deliberate and gentle, tracing the scars’ edges and then sliding flat-palmed straight across them. It was a language he almost understood; not pretending the marks could smooth away, but reminding him the flesh beneath was sound. He bent his head and, feeling strangely daring considering the circumstances, kissed her again, careful of his stubble, and was warmed through by her response.

              She relaxed under his hands and, later, his mouth, her open enjoyment seeping like rain into the cracks in him. Then, and later as she slipped onto him and rocked sweetly, he began to understand. This was all those things he had thought it might be, love and grief and fear and tenderness, but it was also a benediction.

              Most of his regrets weren’t hers to forgive; that belonged to someone else, if it was possible. But she was urging him not to bear them without hope. Like the missile control, she had profiled him as a two-key system; she had turned the first with her words and the second with her hunger for and delight in him now. It was a gift she could only have given him here, that he’d had no chance to disbelieve because he couldn’t have imagined it.

              He lost track of how many times he said her name, as he brought her home and then as he followed. For a while, it was the only language that made sense.

              He was tracing the vertebrae on the small of her back afterward, watching bemused as she kissed the fingers of his other hand and didn’t seem to regret him yet, when the time came for her death protocols to kick in. The air was tight enough in here, but outside, in six very bad places on four continents, it was raining fire.

 

              The wall vibrated against his ear.

              The expected runabout, the same late-model Scarab jet boat as earlier by the sound, coming for the final act to take them while unconscious. It was the last element of dread, to circle while they sank down into darkness again, knowing what, this time, they’d wake to.

              They dressed quickly, as if it mattered; no point fighting habit at this point. He broke open his watch and kludged together the wiring and battery to give them a spark.

              Lizzy watched silently.   She had seen too much here on this island to disagree, but instinct was strong, and he sensed that that silence was a victory in itself.  He sat down beside her when he was ready.

              She covered his working hand with hers. To stop him, he thought for a moment, but it lay lightly on top instead, shaking because of course one shook; it was only so he didn’t have to do it alone. The weave of the duvet wouldn’t catch at first, and he had to cut and unravel a bit to start with a thinner tuft, hands clumsy from the thickening air. The world had no interest in cooperating with making it smooth or poetic.

              And then it did catch, a pale coruscating flame and a thin stream of oily smoke winding up to the ceiling. The fumes were light; they’d collect at the top before layering down. “Lizzy,” he said quietly, “the fire won’t touch us this time. You understand? It’s not the same.”

              But it didn’t matter; she was visibly terrified now, hugging her arms to her sides to stop herself from stopping him, eyes watering, jittering her feet. “Sorry,” she whispered, because her voice was breaking, and embarrassment held on till the end. “Thought I had this.”

              The helpless rage he’d been keeping at bay rose like a thunderclap, or a tidal swell. They would kill her monstrously – he could see her body in front of him, disfigured like the others – so he was killing her instead. He knew he could still do it, and hated himself for that, and the world for doing this relentlessly down all the years, hunting him down like a dog with always another terrible necessary errand.

              He moved back beside her and pulled her head down into his chest, slowly to give her time to pull back. She’d pulled inward already, though, stiff with the effort of doing nothing. The stink of chemical flagration was rising, his throat was beginning to sting, he gave them another five to eight minutes, and to hell with the world and everything in it, if this was the best it could do and he was the best it could send. He slammed his free palm against the wall.

              “Raymond,” Lizzy got out suddenly, in a truly appalling misquote, “I forgot. I was saving this one. _The world must try to break the ones who try to save it_.”

              It was apropos of nothing. The fumes must be getting to her. Grief nearly closed his throat. “That’s not what I wanted for you.”

              She wheezed and shook her head. “I wasn’t talking about me.”

              It was a better epitaph than he’d ever expected. Just enough for him to still himself and hold it together for her just a few minutes more.

              He turned his eyes to the ceiling and marveled at how the world was literally going to pieces; he could see the blackening cracks in it breaking through the low ceiling. The fumes must be hitting his brain already, because the cracks were clean and sharp, spreading as he watched; the sky was about to crack like an eggshell.

              He blinked.

              That, or the polymer fumes were corroding a color-matched oil-based sealant coating cracks in the natural wall.

              “Hey,” Lizzy hacked out, “Is that –“

              “Yes.” He scrambled up, eyes stinging and tearing so that he had to take in the world in serial freeze-frame. The concierge of crime, tripping over his own feet to find his five-hundred-dollar shoe to beat out the flame with.  

              Lizzy was better off; she clambered upright on the bed, jumping to touch one of the spidery lines on the wall; her finger came away with an oily smear of glistening sealant, and left behind a visible run of crack along the ceiling.

              “Lizzy, where’s that pocketknife?” His head was pounding; he kicked away the smoking ruin of the extinguished flame, found the knife on the floor by touch, and climbed up beside her to take it on.

              Sealant meant an air leak. An air leak meant when the executioners came, they could be awake lying in wait.

              “This is awkward,” he heard himself saying brightly as he worked at it. “But it’s possible we might not die.”

              Lizzy coughed and blinked her eyes clear; somehow she had fished out a flat plating from the wreckage of his watch, and was going at a second crack.

              He had no intention of thinking about the possible future as he dug, none at all.   Certainly no intention of facing what to do with his empire wrecked, his secrets broadcast to the world – well, the FBI, but it was very nearly the same – and whatever mad brilliance had just happened between them in the shadow of death.

              And when Lizzy glanced over at him, flashed a grin like sunlight in the dark, and wheezed, “Your shirt’s inside out, and everyone’s going to know,” he had no intention of laughing aloud with her, lungs burning like hell, as they bruised their fingers digging for the light.


	3. Chapter 3

             “This isn’t even an estate, Red,” Lizzy said, by way of greeting, when he opened the door.  “For all intents, it’s a separate country, five miles from D.C.   Whoever you’re borrowing from should put in a gas station on the grounds.” 

             She was a bundled figure in the dark, fresh from her marathon debriefing, stepping in to shed her layers. He drank in the sight of her for a moment, bruised but alive, before closing the door.  Her words were a nice offer of normalcy, and for that beat, as he came round behind to tug the coat off her shoulders, he took it.  

             “Another day I’ll give you a tour.  I admit they’re showy, but they have redeeming features.”

             Her coat in his hands, they looked at each other for a long, wordless moment, in the oak-paneled, high-ceilinged grace of the foyer.  Forty hours and fifteen hundred miles from the last set of walls they’d ever expected to see.  After days flushed with false health, her face had now taken on the slightly pale, matter-of-fact look of a person too tired for anything but truth.

_Well. Here we are._

             Lizzy pulled it together first and cut the Gordian knot admirably, saying, “Look, can I just –“ and then stretching up on tiptoes in her boots, bringing her face near his.  Red dipped his head without thinking to come the rest of the way, the easiest thing in the world, and gathered her in against him, her coat still dangling from one hand.  One long kiss, then two shorter ones, exactly like a drink of cold water; reassurance without specificity. 

             Forty hours ago, he’d dropped a man to the ground and crushed his trachea with a forearm, bringing his weight to bear while the fanatic gagged and scrabbled beneath him.  It had taken nearly a minute, while Lizzy brought the next one down for him; Quantico didn’t teach many kill moves.  But it had kept the noise to a minimum and gotten them out with unbloodied stolen vestments.  If she thought a kiss might help them with those memories, it was a far healthier idea than opium. 

             They pulled back, of one mind for that moment, and stood forehead to forehead, leaning on each other. 

             His lip quirked.  “Better?”

             She nodded against him, and let out a long breath.  Ever practical, she used the position to steady herself against him as she kicked her boots off.  “Yeah. You?”

             “Yeah.”  He sighed.  “Hungry?”

             Lizzy pulled back enough to see his face.  “What’s the least complicated food you have in this country?”

             Deadpan, Red answered, “Dried biscuits.” She shuddered and narrowed her eyes, and he allowed himself a smile.  “Too soon?”

             He released her and stepped back, hung the coat on the rack, and padded toward the sleek steel and marble brightness of the kitchen.  There was half a chicken kiev in the fridge.  “How,” he called back over his shoulder, “was debriefing?”

             It was an awkward alliance which had finally found them after another day of dodging cultists on the island, one formed with only the hope of recovering remains and evidence.  Dembe had located them, and the Bureau had cobbled transport together.  On the way back, grinding along in a borrowed Jayhawk chopper cadged off the Coast Guard, with Homeland Security sitting on either side of him, Red had thoroughly wished it were the other way around. 

             Lizzy followed, shedding her gloves and hat on the counter, pulling her scarf loose.  “Kid gloves for me.  The ends justified a lot of means.  You?”

             He shook his head from inside the fridge, fishing out the catering box and starting it in the microwave.  Lizzy’s patience for food preparation didn’t extend to reheating by oven.

             “For once, your task force’s cartoonish lack of internal discipline fails to amuse me.  There should at least have been one of those firm lectures Harold hands out in place of richly deserved suspensions.”   In his own debriefing by Homeland in the Box – perfectly courteous and voluntary, so long as he kept talking – it had been clear he was suspected of inciting Agent Keen into her week of going rogue. 

             Lizzy made a rude noise behind him; he turned and felt the ghost of a smile tug at his lips. “Perhaps if I made it clear I never gave you any intel, and disavowed your actions.”

             He filled a glass from the tap and handed it to her.  She closed the distance in a couple of steps and took it, her other hand at her side, looking steadily at him.  “All of them?” 

             Well, there it was.  Three words, but they covered the distance from challenging to vulnerable, admirably.

             Red turned back to the counter, his back to her.  He bowed his head, and his eyes traced the gray veins in the snowy Calacatta marble.  The possible responses branched out before him, some towards a fight, some towards a far worse silence, a precious dangerous few towards a repeat performance of that night.  With space and leisure this time, and oh, there were a few things he was confident now they’d both like, if there were only a chance to try.  He shook his head and put a firm stop to that line of thought.   

             But the least her openness deserved was the same.  “For the past ten years, there have been six memories I’ve used to…remind me of my purposes, or keep me from losing my way.  Occasionally, to resist interrogation.”  He turned back to her, unsure what the mix of long habits of control and the conscious choice to be open now showed on his face.  “I believe there are now seven.”

             Lizzy gave him a brief, heart-lightening smile, warming him in the blue-gray chop of her eyes.  “Respect.” She half-lifted her glass of water in salute.  “That was very smooth.”

             Red laughed a bit, and then coughed as his sore lungs resented it, but he could feel what seemed to creep in under the words.   If he was right, well, having worked diligently to include dissipation among the jewels in his reputation, he couldn’t fault her.  She might have long ago stopped doubting his platonic devotion, but she had moved herself into different waters now, and wasn’t sure of what would happen if they mixed.  He might have reassured her on that count _– Lizzy, I was happily married, the last time I chose freely who to be -_ but decided against it, as both presumptuous and irrelevant.

             Remembering, he fished in his pocket.  He pulled out a pill in a blister seal and handed it over.  Lizzy took it in her free hand, puzzled for a moment, and then not puzzled.

             “I wasn’t sure of your timing, whether there was any risk.  If there is, I believe you have…” - he checked his watch – “another twenty hours to decide whether to take it.  Sooner is always more certain.” 

             He lost track of what flashed across her face: surprise, recognition, contemplation.  Then something like amusement: _after everything,_ _wouldn’t that be_ exactly _how I’d wind up starting a family?_  Aloud, she finally said, “You’d think that would have occurred to me.”   She held the blister seal a moment longer, glanced at the water glass in her other hand, then filed the seal away in her pocket.  

             Red had killed four men in front of her the day before using his hands, counting the one that really owed more to his legs. He and she both knew it was that or themselves, and he regretted those deaths less than most; he had no patience for those who channeled the universal angst and restlessness of youth into indiscriminate violence organized by dogma.  But he’d never had to kill that way under her eyes before.  Now, in the kitchen, as much as he wished she’d take care of things right away, part of him would be grateful to her forever for not downing the pill in front of him that moment, with visible, unhesitating relief. 

             Having successfully ruined the moment, he pulled out the chicken Kiev, fished a fork from the drawer, and handed it over.   “Eat.  Fresh, it was a revelation.  Reheated, it will halfway repair the mood.”  She took it with a fresh smile, ghosts banished momentarily by hunger, and they retreated to the dining room.  

             Lizzy had never become comfortable in the opulence of the places he encamped and did business in; she tended to pick out a single human-scaled room in each to spend her time in.  But tonight, digging in, she clearly felt the outsized teak table, chandelier and even frieze moldings were welcome to do their worst.   

             In her hearty attack on the chicken, he saw, couldn’t unsee, the way she’d moved that night in the cell.  Not during but after, stretching herself out in matter-of-fact momentary happiness, despite everything, as they came down.

             He sat across from her as she wolfed it down.  Then, he caught himself, out of habit, rising again to pour them both a glass of wine – it was almost tragic to see the chicken go without it – but it didn’t seem the thing to add to the mix just then.  

             Somewhere, Dembe was recovering control over the last-resort accounts the death protocols had left open in case of the impossible.  Less than half of a percent of his prior holdings.  Enough to live well, far longer than he was likely to live; not enough to move the world the way he’d planned.  It was disorienting, heartbreaking, and oddly light, all at once. 

             Lizzy wasn’t too absorbed in the food to read his mind, with her intermittent uncanny penetration.  “What did your protocols do?  Will you be all right?”

             He nodded.  “As will you. There’s more than enough to continue your detail.”

             The look she gave him spoke eloquent volumes about her opinion of security details, his priorities in general, and the change of subject.  He raised his hands in half-surrender.  “There’s always another way.  Most of my assets were never financial.  I’ll need to shift some of my time around, though.  The Task Force has enough intel now to work with for a while anyway.”

             She thought about that for a few moments, the rest of the Blacklist that his death protocols had released to Cooper in one go, while she mopped up the last bits of stuffing with the remaining shreds of breading.  He saw the wheels turning, was briefly irritated with himself for saying even what he had, and then recognized that as ridiculous.  The obvious truths weren’t his to control; she would have figured it out, or he’d have had to tell her, shortly anyway. 

             Lizzy dropped her fork.  “You’re going to be outed.”

             His expression went reflexively into neutral.  She picked up steam. 

             “Another few hundred high-value criminals brought down, or anyway targeted, but this time all within a few months - forget the task force; they’ll create a full division – all using information you were privy to.  No one could _not_ connect that many dots and realize you're a CI. All those roads lead to you.”  She pushed her plate aside.

             Red took a breath.  His habit was to project calm and control; any number of delightful non sequiturs were at the ready. But Lizzy knew how to brush those off like dust now in turn, even if she usually humored him enough not to.  And he was tired, and he couldn’t remember what the point was anyway. 

             He made a quick mental note to delay starting the underground rumors about his survival by a couple of days. That way, when they hit fever pitch in a week, he’d be back in peak form for a proper cheerfully sinister return.

             “’An extra four years’, someone told me recently,” he said finally.   “Every day from now on is our bonus round now.”

             She waved that aside even quicker than expected, and dug for her phone.  “I’ll call Cooper.  He won’t have passed any of your intel on till he’s reviewed it.  He can’t be finished.  We can space them out. Use the same order you were planning on.”   

             Red half-stood, reached across that massive table and caught her wrist.  Might as well cover the rest at this point.  “Lizzy.  Harold Cooper may have ended his career today by letting me leave the Post Office once Homeland was gone.  Let him be.”

              She looked at him impatiently, uncomprehending, reaching for the phone with her other hand. Then it hit her.

              “Your immunity deal.  It’s worthless now.”  Essentially true; it was valid on paper, but the incentive for any agency to honor it instead of disappearing him was gone.  She stood slowly, her eyes wrecked.  “Holy hell, Red. What are you still doing here?  Where’s your jet?”

              “Standing by.”  It came out oddly thick; even this small plan for the evening was falling apart.  He’d hoped this could wait at least till she finished eating.

              She abandoned her plate and paced a little half-circle round the room.  “Wait.  Wait. The List was your little curated masterpiece, all the people you wanted to take down the most.  It was never everything you had. You could draw up Volume Two overnight and make the same deal again.”

              It was silly, but despite everything, he couldn’t help enjoying the views.  The gears turning as she talked through it, and her well-loved form as she circled the room.   He wanted to let her go on, to watch and memorize a few moments more, but it seemed selfish.  “There are a few more prizes I’m willing to sell out.  But I need them for other buyers.  For some specific favors.” 

              Lizzy paced herself out of the dining room altogether and wandered into the lower-ceilinged den.  It was no doubt the room she would have adopted here if he were staying longer, in deliberate ignorance of the value of the silk Isfahan rug under her socks.  He followed her into the jewel-colored stained-glass lamplight.

              “You’re going to have a half-dozen government agencies and the most truly evil players in your underworld after you, all at the same time.”

              He grinned.  “Just those, and you’re worried? I’m insulted.  Once, in Juba -” 

              She looked at him in exasperation.  “I wouldn’t be if you were making the smallest effort to get a head start.”

              Red couldn’t let that pass. He raised an eyebrow, reclining back on the buttery leather of the couch.  “You’d have been pleased if I’d said goodbye from a burner phone, a mile above an unspecified ocean?” 

              He had her there, and from the way her lip quirked, she knew it.  “All right. Furious.  But not _worried_.”

              He laughed, the ache inside his chest familiar now.  Now that he thought of it, he should do more or less that – untraceable goodbye calls, but flavored with contempt – to Homeland and the couple of agencies with overseas bureaus that had showed up to his debriefing.  It would make it personal, get them interested enough in his trail to show up quickly if he needed to use them later to create a diversion.

              But something she’d said a moment before was still catching at him. “‘Most truly evil?’ Have you decided you’ve deduced the organizing principle of the List?” He stretched out his arm over the seatback while she prowled the middle of the room.  “Because that’s not it.”

              Then he realized he’d misjudged; there was a flicker on her face of something else, a pain rawer and somehow _other_ than even the fear for his safety. 

              “Lizzy.  What is it?”        

              She looked at him for a long moment, hands at her sides, more uncertain than angry.   Right or wrong, Lizzy was rarely uncertain.  Finally she said, “It can wait.  What do you need now?” 

              He laughed once, in surprise more than amusement; she also rarely waited to speak her mind.  “I need you not to be burdened with the details of a fugitive’s itinerary.”  The look on her face had him reconsidering the advisability of wine, but he forged ahead.  “There’s no danger right now.  What I need is for you to come and sit, and tell me how things went today.  Or how Hudson whimpered in delight when you came for him.  Or what you had for lunch.” 

              The last half of that almost surprised him; under the light words, it had taken a hard turn towards the maudlin.

              Lizzy had caught it too.  “Jesus, Red.  Or maybe give you another epitaph?  What’s happening here?”

              He twitched. “I liked the one you gave me already.  The original quote, you know -”

              “- That was wishes talking.  No. It was hope.”    

              Whatever had flashed out from her for a moment before was clearly lifting its head again, but he was still lost.  “What?”

              Lizzy hugged her arms to her chest, looking inward.  Watching her face in the shadows of her dark hair falling forward of it, he was reminded of a boat in a cross sea, tumbled between two perpendicular sets of waves. He was increasingly certain that he was in on only one of two conversations taking place here tonight. 

              That was a shame; he’d been braced for the one about what had happened between them, at once dreading and hoping to speak of it.

              She did come and sit then, with a foot of space between them. But only, apparently, to redirect her energy from standing to whatever was going on in her head.   Finally, with a sort of deliberate simplicity, coming back to the concrete, she said, “How long will you stay?”

              He supposed he should match it.  “Just tonight.”

              Lizzy swallowed, easily readable at that moment: misery. 

              They had spent too many years circling each other warily, each trying not to reveal how much the other could affect them; they had worked too hard to move past it to go back there now.   

              “Come with me, Lizzy. For a week or so; I don’t mean leave your life here. And I don’t mean because of what happened. But it doesn’t have to be like this.  You could use, we could both use, time to get our feet back under us.  It could be easier to do it side by side. After that…there’s world enough, and time, as Elliot would say.  It will be all right.” 

              He was aware he was nearly babbling by the end.  Almost nonsensical, not for lack of meaning, but for excess.  It would have been a much simpler suggestion before two days ago, and he meant it simply still, but there was no taking that night back.

              As he’d hoped, some of the tension went out of her as he spoke, whatever part had been the old fear that he could in fact leave without a backward glance.  It was at once touching, selfishly gratifying, and a bitter reminder that he had played his public role all too well, if she could still believe that enough for it to show. 

              But for all that, Red could only half hope she’d agree.  The offer hadn’t been impulsive; he’d planned to make it tonight regardless of her state of mind, if only to give her the power of refusal.  Among a suite of bad options, it was less unhealthy than disappearing completely just now, and selfishly, he was finding himself even hungrier for her company than usual.  But a week back on the lam together, both their defenses in ruins, her facing an apparent choice between him and the FBI with the playing field tilted toward him in every possible way – it wasn’t a formula for a free decision, or one she could live for years with. 

              A few months ago he would have suggested it without qualms, secure she knew her final place and it was the Bureau.  But the past few days and tonight’s conversation were creating doubt, despite his efforts to dismiss it as presumptuous.  And that possibility, though almost painfully sweet to think of – he had intended to earn her trust, but never her loyalty – was as dangerous as any of the cold-eyed snipers he’d come to turn aside from her.   He had seen good people torn between attachment and conscience; it was one of the few tools of persuasion he had never been cold enough to use.  

              If it came to that in the next week, he’d have to send her back, or at least leave her.  She’d call him arrogant and inscrutable again, and their last memory for a while would be shouting at each other in an empty mansion on another continent.

              Red became aware Lizzy was gazing at him, eyes narrowed, clearly wishing she had another airtight prison cell on hand to loosen his mouth again.  He wasn’t, he realized, thinking as quickly as usual.  Perhaps Dembe should handle their tactics for the new few days; it would fit with delaying the rumors of his survival anyway.  Unless the real problem was that he didn’t think as quickly as he used to _any more_.

              But then, it was her turn to answer.

              “Ok,” she said finally. “I mean, maybe.  But there’s another conversation we need to have first.  I need.”

              Red gave up once and for all on the idea of getting through the evening unlubricated. He rose and poured them each a glass of white from the wet bar.  It was a 2013 Château Smith-Haut-Lafitte, and as always, Lizzy started in with a goal-oriented indifference that half amused and half pained him. 

              He was ready again for her to speak of the night before, or the secrets he’d offered to share when they’d had a life expectancy counted in hours.  So of course she rose again, stood over him as if he were back in the Box being interrogated, and said instead, “You’re not running from Homeland.  You’re not running at all.   You’re trying to finish what you started.”

              That was an unwelcome new direction. He raised his eyebrows, noncommittal, and said nothing.  But the threads that had risen to the surface a few times that night were gathering here; there was more than her usual intensity looking back at him now.  This was important to her in a way he didn’t yet grasp.

              Lizzy seemed to reach a decision.  “I need a favor. You’ll hate it. But you’re flexible. Be a little flexible now, and consider it, all right?  You know you like it when people owe you favors.”

              Red braced himself and nodded. 

              She seemed to gather herself, like a diver on a board, for something small but irrevocable.  She sat back down.  “Tell me your endgame.”

              His heart sank; he folded his arms behind his head to cover for it.  “’Flexible’?  I like that.  Lizzy, you know it doesn’t work that way.  You can’t have thought that…any recent developments changed that.”

              There was a momentary flicker of amusement in her eyes.  “They might have, with a normal human.  But I’m not playing that card.  I’m going to tell you why you want to tell me.”

              If he might not see her again for months, at least there could be worse memories to tide him over than Lizzy using his own negotiation tactics against him.   “Please do.”

              She leaned forward, half-twisted toward him, meeting his eyes. “You need an ally here more than ever.  We both know you never do anything for just one reason.  One reason you came to the FBI four years ago was to access some resources, some pull that even you didn’t have.  And your pull now – I’m sorry, Red, truly, it must feel like losing your hands – it’s smaller than ever.  You’re as desperate now as you ever get. Not to escape, but to finish something.” She paused a moment, watching him; half profiling, half coaxing a stray to take food from her hand. 

              “I want to see you come out alive.  And I want to help you, with your ridiculous, impenetrable purposes.  But I also, call me selfish, want to keep a shred of self-respect.  Not wonder all my life if I betrayed my country because I couldn’t shake the conviction your intentions were good.  I can’t. I’ll quit if I have to.  So will you, for once in four goddamn years, _be the slightest bit reasonable?_ ”

              Red swore, silently, at himself.  He could have anticipated the position she was in now; not the specifics of the past week, but the fact that he’d set personal trust and abstract ethics on a collision course in her life.  He had avoided that in years past by feeding her titrated, legitimate reasons for distrust on the one hand, and keeping her in the dark about his actions on the other.  Keeping her at arm’s length that way had first felt noble, and then manipulative and tawdry.  At some point, certain he’d never ask her to cross lines for him anyway, he’d just stopped trying.    

              She was right, of course, about the difference that access to FBI resources would make now – a hell of a lot better than keeping hostile agencies trailing after him in case he needed fireworks.  They’d be invaluable.  Right before they got her fired and imprisoned.  The irony wasn’t lost on him; it was only fair that he too should face a choice between two incompatible goods. 

              “I’m sorry,” he said, to both of them.  “I don’t want you to help, Lizzy.  I understand; it’s like asking for your soul.  Never mind that week’s vacation. I want you to focus on your honest work. And stop giving your detail the slip.  And let me come and see you later, once in a while, if your conscience can stretch that far.”

              She ran one hand through her hair.  “Then tell me you expect to come out alive from this, without your empire _or_ FBI resources.”

              That silenced him.  Committing never to lie to her had seemed like a noble line to draw, once.   He sighed, his stomach roiling.

              “Lizzy, if you continue with the Bureau in the areas we’ve worked in, there’s an excellent chance you’ll wind up one day in the hands of someone who will ask you what I’m doing.  If you know, I can tell you now, you’ll try to conceal it.  And I’m telling you now, if ever you’re back in unfriendly hands that way, I don’t want you motivated to conceal anything.  You must say whatever it takes to leave alive.” 

              Then something else occurred to him.  Could that night in the cell have brought her to this point?  From the closeness of their fit, he’d thought it had likely been a while for her before that.  That would make two of them, but Lizzy was far too practical to let a loving touch after a long dry spell confuse her like this.  Wasn’t she?

              She had set the wine glass aside on the end table, mostly full.  She was throwing her hands up.  “ _You are trying to protect me from all the wrong things_.”  She rubbed her temples, as if dealing with a particularly hopeless child were giving her a headache.  “Okay. I’m not here to argue with you.  Especially not on possibly the last night…we’ll say the last night for a while.    If you won’t tell me, you won’t, and we can go back to talking through our insecurities about ‘recent developments’.  Though frankly, I think your travel plans have knocked that out of top billing.  But this refrain about it being for my own good…” 

              “It is, more than ever, for your own good,” he retorted, fear giving it more heat than he’d intended.  “Listen to yourself.  Offering to divert government resources to a murderous criminal’s personal agenda.  The last thing you need is to get more deeply entangled.  Your judgement appears to be compromised enough right now.” And then, with uncharacteristic and deliberate crudeness, “I try to give satisfaction, Lizzy, but I’m pretty sure I’m not _that_ good a lay.”

              To his surprise, after a moment of baffled blankness, Lizzy laughed at him.  Or possibly at them both.  “Is that what you think this is about?” 

              Then the laughter sent her into a brief coughing fit of her own, spoiling the effect.  But she recovered, cocked her head, looked at him for a long moment, and then started to shake it.  “Four years in, and I finally get a glimpse of what it’s like to be you talking to me.  To someone who’s got the facts completely right and the logic completely backwards.”

              She popped back up off the couch and started pacing again.  “Reddington, I’m a profiler on one hand and a sworn federal agent on the other.  I’ve spent the last four years trying to reconcile the man I know with the crime lord CI I’m assigned to handle.  Want a progress report?”  Her voice took on an almost didactic quality.  “Antisocial subjects who are ruthlessly indifferent to most of humanity can have caring relationships within tightly-defined circles.  But they rarely take the trouble to fake illustrative executions, prevent civilian casualties in standoffs, and scuttle diamond mine takeovers over working conditions.”

              She rubbed her eyes, not profiling now, not even looking for his reaction.  “I tried for a year once to fit you as a monomaniac.  Brilliant means, insane ends, everything twisted to one mad purpose.  It’s not how you work.  Not the tiny parts you let me see. Or the ones you think I don’t, your actual damned illegal judge-and-jury executions.  They save more lives than my arrests, which by the way is, Red, it’s sick. It scares me.” 

              That moral vertigo of realizing what it meant that the law was made by people just like one’s self. That there were crimes it did not cover, and types of justice found only in the empty space outside it. Remembering the first time he’d felt all that himself, decades before, he could sympathize. 

              “So I’m left with two theories.  You’re exactly that mad, and that much smarter than me; or _you’re fighting something terrible that no one else can see_. 

              “So you’ll excuse me, I hope, if on the night we were both supposed to kick it, I decided it was time to commit to one.  Expecting to be tortured to death in the morning concentrates the mind wonderfully, you’d say.” 

              Having killed poor Johnson all over again with that mangling of his words, she broke her momentum for a moment and averted her eyes.  Impossibly, a little smile tugged at one corner of her mouth.  “All right, and possibly, I may also have been wanting to jump you for years.  But the point is, that night aside, I know that when you disappear tonight you’re going to either burn the world or save it.”

              She dropped down beside him on the couch, and closer up, he could see her eyes were a bit too shiny.  Her voice was steady, but her body, between the caloric and respiratory stresses of the past week, had emptied its reserves.

              “So possibly, with all your literary philosophical whatnot, you can understand the position this puts me in.  I’m not trying to follow you to the ends of the earth, for God’s sake.  I’m trying to figure out, on maybe the last chance I’ll get, whether I have to stop you or help you.  And not to whine when you just lost your kingdom, but it’s driving me a little mad _._   So here I am, in the unbelievable position of asking your opinion about whether I should trust you.  Help me, or give me the dignity of saying that you won’t for your own reasons.  But don’t…”  And then she ran out of steam, and lifted her hands, helplessly.  “Don’t do this thing you do.”

              Red realized that at some point he’d begun nodding, idiotically.  His mind was clocking over into the red.  Understanding her position now was small comfort; the trouble was how to ever resolve it. 

              And he didn’t like seeing her anywhere near the moral precipice he’d gone over more than thirty years ago.  But he was not quite fool enough to think he could keep her from going over herself if she chose.  Keeping her alive was one thing, but when one soul was eye-to-eye with the fathomless depths of the moral universe, all another could be was company. 

              First things first.  Her immediate problem was still how to handle him.

              Aloud, he said, mechanically, “Arlo Mediche will deplane in thirty minutes from Delta 547 at Dulles.  He has a warehouse in Arlington full of an aerosolized neurolytic, and he just received directions on where to use it.”

              And then, as he saw the look on her face, “I’m not doing that ‘thing’, Lizzy.  I just don’t think quite as quickly as I used to.”

              She closed her eyes.  After a moment her chest shook a few times, silently.  Laughter again, from some strange well of understanding that could find humor here.  “OK.  You bought yourself the length of a phone call.”  She looked back up at him and then, without moving her eyes, speed-dialed Cooper and started to report. 

              He needed the time not to plan, but to process.  For an impossible moment, he let himself think of the words he would have liked to say.

              _Lizzy, my operation is, was, the third most lucrative business of this century, and it was built on the control of information.  Think of what that means.  It may be true that the world is bendable, and a class of men can live like gods by folding it to suit their purpose, bleeding the rest, until thousands die silently daily from the loss. But it is also true_ they cannot do it in the light _._

 _Can you imagine what would happen if someone let light in?  Not exposed a crime here or there, but lifted the rock from over all their machines and kingdoms, broke their system altogether, put the fear in them that_ they could not keep their secrets _?  It would take them a generation to rebuild. It would be worth a life’s work, and worth men’s lives, for the tens of thousands it would save._

_But it would take a man positioned where all their roads meet to do it.  And he would need to first clear out those with the drive or knowledge to rebuild._

_Plus maybe a few of, as you called it, the most truly evil._

              “No, sir, I was about to say the same,” Lizzy was saying. “Frankly, I don’t think I’d add much to the analysis right now anyway.  I’ll keep up during the week and be back the next Monday.  Yes sir, in the Post Office, not AWOL on another unmapped island. Thank you, sir.”    She closed the call and set the phone on the coffee table; her eyes closed for a moment, in weariness this time.

              He was left with two thoughts.  First, if he told her, after keeping it so many years, safe in only his head, what would that do?  Songs and stories accepted love as a justification; consequences didn’t.  And if he didn’t, she’d said almost the literal truth about the position she was in: a person could go mad.

              Second, the way her world was shifting here, and with her newfound penchant for rogue lone-wolf investigations, he was no longer certain that here was the safest place for her.

              Lizzy had opened her eyes and was watching him, reading who-knew-how-much of that from his face.  “It really is,” she said softly, “a lot of filth for anyone to wade through.  There has to be the worst reason, or the best.”

              Touched and sorry beyond his facility with words, and acting on a new habit apparently formed days before, he pulled her toward him, forehead to forehead.  “I know, sweet girl.  Like a quadratic equation. Two perfect solutions, and no way to choose.  I’m sorry.” 

              Lizzy, with the enviable freedom of one whose cards are all already on the table, traced her fingers down his face, then the line of his neck.  There was a palpable tension in them, fear and love and hope together.  

              “All of this,” she said for both of them, “is so messed up.”

              He laughed a bit, fingers carding through her hair.  “Depends on which has primacy, evidence or logic.”

              “Lines like that usually work for you?”

              “Less often than you may have been led to believe.”   He came to a decision, and hoped heartily it was for the right reasons.  “I don’t suppose,” he murmured, finding her palm and sweeping one finger over her scar, “that you’d consider a trade?  Take over one of my remaining safehouses, consult for the FBI remotely, and promise never again to chase kidnappers who you know have just bought gas masks? Then I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

              “Tempting,” she returned, hands ghosting down his shoulders.  “Reverse the order of events, and I’ll consider it.”

               His heart thumped absurdly at that, like a boy’s. He was _nearly_ certain she was joking. As he always did when taken aback, he doubled down.

              “You’re failing to see the possibilities of my way, Lizzy.”  He caught her hands, laid them flat on the couch, and braceleted her wrists with his fingers.  “You could be the reluctant FBI agent pulled into the twilight of my world.  I could be the desperate criminal who lures you in for his own mysterious, unspeakable ends.”   Part teasing, part warning, part offering.

              But she dipped her head and kissed him; gentle, unreserved, and a little sad.  “More nights together, with a side of absolution for me?  Sign me up on my next birthday.  But Red…a sin eater even in fantasies, really?  I think you need to tell someone as badly as I need to know.  Even, I can’t believe I’m saying this, even if it’s not me.  Come back to the human race. At least partway.”

              His breath caught.  Given the ease with which she was dissecting him, part of him was surprised he had to tell her anything.  But he laid a hand on her head, silently, and came to another decision.

               “Not a trade, then?  Maybe a compromise.”   He pulled back again for a moment to see her.   “It’s not mine to tell you, Lizzy.  If you ever believed I kept a secret for good reason, believe it now.  But I’ll tell you this, and it’s more than I ever intended.”  He tilted his head and looked her over, fear taking a momentary back seat to pride. “I know you now.  Not the remembered child or the imagined young woman, whose only hold on me was duty.  But the heart that came back from safety to save a criminal near-stranger, sold a home to fund the care of a wronged child, and used her last night alive to give me the kind of peace she had to offer.”

              Red laid his palms against the sides of her face.  “That heart, if you knew my purpose, I believe would be ahead of me, leading the charge.”   He willed himself to a small smile.  “Can that possibly be enough to stave off madness for a while?”

              Lizzy searched his face for a long time.  He was not sure he knew anymore how to hold nothing back in it.  But he tried, and trusted that she would at least see that. 

              Finally she let out a long breath. The line of her shoulders softened, just visibly.  Without her moving further, he thought he saw something just begin to come unclenched, as if what he’d thought was bone and structure had only ever been a knot.   

              He wondered, in a peculiar flash of clarity or exhausted nonsense, what other clamped-down sides of her might now begin to show themselves.  And, if this tiny crumb he could offer now could do this much, what would come boiling out if she ever had to learn the rest.  He wished he’d realized sooner that such a promise from him could be worth this to her.

                Meanwhile, Lizzy had pulled it back together.  “Possibly, for now.  Maybe.  Okay. We can worry later about the assault team you’re going to want next month in Lithuania.”

              “ _There’s not going to be an assault team in Lithuania._ No wading through filth, Lizzy. That’s not why I told you.”

              “Yes, of course,” she said almost absently, waving that aside.  “You’ll do it all alone because no one else could possibly bear the burden, etcetera.  That is completely reasonable.  We can talk about all that later this week.  On vacation.” 

              He listened with a feeling like one that a man, walking on what he thought was a small secret path, might have watching a train come up it behind him and roar past.    

              Lizzy had tilted her head.  “ _Reddington_ ,” she finished simply, equal parts exasperation and tenderness.  

              Like an addict, or like a man just out of prison, or simply greedy, he kissed her again, tracing his fingers down her back.  He wanted to reverse the years of wrenching confusion.  He wanted to watch her keep defending justice under the law, which had its place; and he wanted to hide her in a safehouse far from all of it.   He wanted to ask her what she wanted between them now, and in the months they’d be apart; and he wanted to let her recover first enough to think about it sanely.  He wanted to use what he’d learned she liked two nights before. 

              And being no longer twenty years old, he wanted, he admitted with greater honesty, to fall asleep with her on the couch, or the bed, or anywhere really, and do all those other wonderful things in the morning.  

              Naturally, that was when the periphery sensors lit up, and the television came to autonomous life.  It brought up a false-color infrared image of the south gate, where three armored trucks were discharging an improbable number of black-covered toughs in night goggles, hustling offscreen into the grounds.

              Lizzy froze, glanced over at him, and then relaxed fractionally when she saw his unconcern.  “No danger tonight, you said?” she asked him evenly. 

              He grinned, though his muscles ached in anticipation of a busy next half-hour.  “Yes, love, but I didn’t say no visitors.” 

              The view telescoped down into one quarter of the screen.  Three other bird’s-eye views from other entry points filled the rest of it, with emerging ground-retractable vehicle barriers, tire spikes and, delightfully, tripwires.  “And I did mention the grounds had redeeming features.  They’re twenty minutes from the house on foot.  Not to crowd you, but I’m going to ask you to start that week’s vacation tonight.”  He rose and pulled her up to standing.

              Lizzy’s eyes narrowed, shooting back to her cell phone on the table.  “Dammit. Red, the call to Cooper.”

              He palmed it into his pocket as they swept into the foyer.  “Yes; must be a trace on the signal.  We’ll drop it in the incinerator on our way out.  You know, those boys move like CIA.  Looks like a bit of off-book, unauthorized interagency collaboration.  As a taxpayer, I’m gratified.  This way now.”

              “You just claimed to be a _what_?” she sputtered, scrambling into her boots. 

              He laughed, reaching back for her elbow as they moved out into the chill of the garage.  His lungs barely hurt at all.

              For the first time he could remember, as he started up the engine, he suspected that there was, in fact, both world enough and time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one was unplanned! Helpful critiques much appreciated, especially on the thought/dialogue balance, characterization as always, and anything else.


End file.
